traveling collector
The Water Works with the Philadelphia
Museum of Art in the background.
Thomas Eakins’ Philadelphia
Beneath the current art scene, the heart of the city’s most famous
native painter still beats. By Cathleen McCarthy
A
tour of the places Thomas Eakins
(1844–1916) lived, worked and wandered in search of subject matter brings art
history to life and lends new dimension to
aspects of Philadelphia often overlooked,
even by resident connoisseurs. Many of the
artist’s favorite haunts remain surprisingly
unchanged by the passage of time. Though he
had a difficult relationship with many in the
Philadelphia art community, Eakins loved the
city and captured every facet. You can find
Eakins’ representations of the city’s vibrant
culture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art:
sculling on the Schuylkill River (“The PairOared Shell,” 1872), sailing on the Delaware
(“Sailboats Racing on the Delaware River,”
1874), buggy rides in Fairmount Park (“A
May Morning in the Park,” 1879–80), hunting and fishing in the surrounding marshes
(“Mending the Net” and “Shad Fishing at
Gloucester on the Delaware River,” both
1881), boxing matches (“Between Rounds,”
1898) and a cast of local characters from
singers to surgeons.
Step outside the museum and you’ll find
the Schuylkill River itself, where scullers still
row their shells beneath arched stone bridges.
At the base of the museum is the renovated
Water Works, nearly two centuries old, where
a restaurant recently opened looking out over
the river and Boathouse Row. In May 1872,
Eakins joined some 30,000 spectators here
to watch the boat races. He was so caught
up in the excitement of competitive rowing
that he produced 19 rowing scenes between
1870 and 1874.
Before he became a painter, Eakins studied
anatomy at Jefferson Medical College. For
more than a century, viewing his most famous
paintings required a pilgrimage to two different medical colleges. The Eakins Gallery at
Jefferson had the artist’s masterpiece of sur-
gical theater, “The Gross Clinic” (1875) and
two well-known portraits, while the medical
school at the University of Pennsylvania had
“The Agnew Clinic” (1889), another surgical
drama. Both are enormous canvases depicting the heads of rival medical colleges demonstrating groundbreaking surgeries before
students in their respective auditoriums.
Unlike “Gross,” the portrait of Dr. Agnew
was commissioned and includes individual
portraits of students, including Eakins, watching as he performs a mastectomy. (Jefferson
also sold both portraits recently, so there is
no Eakins left at the Eakins Gallery.) But the
PMA now has “Agnew” on renewable loan
and is sharing “Gross” with the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts, which Eakins attended
and where he taught, a few blocks away.
When “The Gross Clinic” was unveiled in
1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Fairmount Park, viewers and critics were horrified
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Thomas Eakins, "The Gross Clinic," 1875, oil on canvas.
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ART & ANTIQUES SEPTEMBER 2007
by its bloody scalpel and open wound. Jefferson alumni purchased it for $200 and gave
it to the college, where it remained tucked
away until Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton
(in partnership with the National Gallery of
Art) attempted to buy it last year for her new
Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas. The
news met with outrage. Some 3,400 people
donated $68 million to keep the painting in
Philadelphia.
You will find “The Gross Clinic” at the
Academy through June 2008, between an
evocative portrait of Walt Whitman, photographs (including a few by Eakins) of Eakins’ classes and anatomical casts and models
he used to teach students there for a decade.
After June, the painting moves to the PMA,
between the Agnew Clinic and the remarkable
portrait of Dr. Benjamin Howard Rand, pensively reading while stroking his cat. Dr. Rand
will relocate to Arkansas in 2009. (Walton
did not go away empty-handed.) One benefit
of this recent flurry of sales was to centralize
the city’s Eakins holdings.
The academy now proudly displaying “The
Gross Clinic” actually forced Eakins to resign
in 1886, after he caused a scandal by removing the loincloth from a male model in a
women’s drawing class. Eakins was a revered
but controversial teacher who believed in a
scientific approach to art, insisting that his
students photograph and paint each other
nude and dissect cadavers to learn anatomy.
They also dissected horses, cows and, on one
occasion, a lion that died at the Philadelphia
Zoo. Their casts of disintegrating body parts
are displayed at both the Academy and the
PMA. After his dismissal, Eakins fell into a
depression and stopped painting for a couple
of years. After his death his widow left the
bulk of his estate to the PMA.
Built in 1862 and now containing an inn
with five restaurants, the Union League has
an art collection that was long restricted to
members or guests but tours of the 189 art
works displayed throughout the regal French
Renaissance building on Broad Street now
can be arranged by appointment. Eakins
scored his first major commission from the
Union League: a painting of its then-president, Rutherford B. Hayes. Members where
dismayed by the portrait he produced of a
flushed, perspiring Hayes—the chief executive was a well-known teetotaler—and the
Itinerary
painting soon vanished, never to be seen
again. Eakins scholar Kathleen Foster, curator
of American Art at the PMA, has long hoped
the portrait would turn up someday. “If it
wasn’t destroyed, it seems likely it would be
here somewhere,” says Union League curator David Cassedy. “The Union League has
a lot of attics.” Until it does, however, you
won’t find any Eakins works among the many
political portraits.
Eakins’ fascination with science and technology led him to experiment with photography, first by secretly projecting images onto
his canvases, and ultimately as an end in itself,
using a stop-motion camera he invented. You
will occasionally find examples of his early
experiments in rotating photography in the
new extension of the PMA opening this month
in a renovated Art Deco building across the
street. Though the museum won’t have any
Eakins works up in September, the visitors can
schedule an appointment to see anything from
storage that’s not on view, says Foster.
Eakins willed his Mount Vernon Street
townhouse to the city of Philadelphia to be
used for public art purposes, but it sat abandoned until the Mural Arts Program set up
offices there six years ago. Unfortunately,
there is nothing left to see of the artist’s home
or studio except the façade, but you can stop
by to reserve a trolley tour of the city’s murals.
Established in 1984 to “redirect the creative
impulses” of the city’s graffiti artists, MAP
has produced more than 2,700 murals, paying tribute to local legends Patti LaBelle, Wilt
Chamberlain and William Penn, but, so far,
not Eakins.
It’s tempting to wonder what he would
make of the murals—would he see them as
in some sense successors of the grand-scale
portraits and slice-of-life realism he practiced?
“If America is to produce great painters and
if young art students wish to assume a place
in the history of the art of their country, their
first desire should be to remain in America to
peer deeper into the heart of their country,”
he told a reporter in 1914. “Americans must
branch out into their own fields. … Only by
doing this will they create a great and distinctly American art.”
Cathleen McCarthy covered subjects ranging from
ancient gold to contemporary design Art & Antiques,
she has.
David David Gallery
260 S. 18th St. 215.735.2922. Carries
works by Eakins’ contemporaries, such
as Renoir and Childe Hassam.
Gallery 339
339 S. 21st St. 215.731.1530.
www.gallery339.com
Locks Gallery
600 Washington Square South
215.629.1000. www.locksgallery.com
Mural Arts Program
1729 Mount Vernon St. 215.685.0750.
www.muralarts.org/tours
Pennsylvania Academy
of the Fine Arts
118 North Broad St. 215.972.7600.
www.pafa.org
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Benjamin Franklin Pkwy. at 26th St.
215.763.8100. www.philamuseum.org
Rittenhouse 1715 (hotel)
1715 Rittenhouse Square St.
215.546.6500. www.rittenhouse1715.com
Schmidt Dean Gallery
1710 Sansom St. 215.569.9433.
www.schmidtdean.com
Schwarz Gallery
1806 Chestnut St. 215.563.4887.
www.schwarzgallery.com.
Carries works by Eakins as well as
contemporaries such as wife Susan
MacDowell Eakins, Childe Hassam,
William Merritt Chase, Cecilia Beaux,
Mary Cassatt and Thomas Anshultz.
Seraphin Gallery
1108 Pine St. 215.923.7000.
www.seraphingallery.com
On Antique Row, carries works by Sidney Goodman who is, like Eakins, a lifetime Philadelphian, PAFA instructor and
famous for painting local characters.
Snyderman-Works Galleries
303 Cherry St. 215.238.9576.
www.snyderman-works.com
The Union League
140 S. Broad St. 215.563.6500.
www.unionleague.org
Water Works Restaurant
and Lounge
640 Water Works Dr. 215.236.9000.
www.thewaterworksrestaurant.com
Woodmere Art Museum
9201 Germantown Ave. 215.247-0476.
www.woodmereartmuseum.org